


Pinky Swear

by Onlymystory



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Buckley Siblings, Fix-it fic, Gen, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Road Trips, The family you choose, as is her birthright, author plays fast and loose with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29485578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onlymystory/pseuds/Onlymystory
Summary: “We could run away. You and me. Right now.”So they do.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Maddie Buckley, Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz
Comments: 22
Kudos: 286





	Pinky Swear

**Author's Note:**

> Omg, all the warnings for 4x5 spoilers.  
> As is the case with all fic writers, I plucked the bits of canon that I wanted, left behind the ones I didn’t, and changed whatever tickled my fancy.  
> This is the way.

“We could run away,” Buck tells Maddie. “Just you and me. Leave Doug and our parents and everything else behind and just start over.” 

He doesn’t tell Maddie about the things he knows. Maddie’s his big sister, she’s nine years older and while she’s his best friend in the entire world, they’ve also lived different lives. Buck doesn’t bring up the way she doesn’t talk to her friends anymore. The way she flinches, just barely, when he hugs her, then hurries to hug him back so he won’t ask any questions. 

Buck’s not dumb either. Not about himself. He knows exactly what he’s doing, what he’s been doing for years with their parents. If he’s hurt, really hurt, then Dad buys things and Mom gets mad enough to yell at him instead of past him. It’s the farthest thing from healthy, but it’s all he’s known. 

Then he went to college. 

He thought, just for a moment, that maybe he could get their attention for doing something good. 

It really should have been more obvious that was never going to work. And the weird thing is, he kind of liked it, liked learning and having people around him who were proud when he did something right. But he’s only nineteen. It’s hard to change years of bad habits. 

His first semester, he did alright overall. Showed up to class, did the work, even stopped in during office hours with all of his professors. (Maddie gave him that bit of advice). Then came the paper for one of his classes. To write about a memory, a moment in your life that has always stood out. A moment of vividness was what his professor called it. Didn’t have to be life-changing. Could be as small as a bowl of soup on a winter day. But they were to examine the memory, to take it out and turn it over and write about why they thought it mattered so far and how it would matter in the future. 

Buck has a lot of vivid memories.

But there was one, in particular, that was like a dangling thread at the edge of his subconscious. He’d never really pulled on that thread before. 

A moment of learning to ride a bike, of getting hurt and learning that was enough to get his parents’ to look at him. It was a moment that started everything about the ugly cycle of his childhood. But the bit that he never examined too closely was the way his parents got so upset at a bike, especially his mom, and yet his dad bought him his own bike the very next day. 

There had to be something about that bike. 

So for his paper--maybe for himself--, he went digging through the old shed in the backyard. 

He found the fake license plate still attached. 

“Daniel,” it read. 

There was something in the back of his mind that tried to tell him to stop. That maybe he didn’t need to know the rest. 

He’d ignored it, of course. Pulled the thread and watched as everything unraveled before him. 

Buck finished the paper. It was the last school assignment he did. After that, it wasn’t even about trying to piss off his parents anymore. He just couldn’t see the point. They didn’t care. Didn’t love him and never had. Never wanted the burden of having to try. 

The wrong son died and Buck spent his entire childhood chasing a ghost he’d never met.

When the semester ended, Buck got a notice that he’d failed out and was being placed on academic probation. He was to meet with his advisor and for some reason he went. 

His professor, the same from the class that started all of it, had opened the conversation with an apology. The TA graded the paper, graded most of them, and is of course young themselves and didn’t quite see the cry for help. The professor admitted to not paying enough attention to such a big, introductory course. “You found out then, didn’t you?” he asked Buck. “Everything in your paper. You learned the truth when you went looking for the bike?”

He said he’d talk to Buck’s other professors and the dean. See if they couldn’t find some way to let Buck make up just enough work to pass the classes after all. If that was what Buck really wanted.

“What I want? I wanted my parents to love me, to care. But they don’t. It doesn’t matter if I’m the perfect son or a nightmare. Everything I do is about trying to figure out what they want me to be,” he’d answered.

“Maybe it’s time for you to do something that you want,” his professor had answered. “Decide who you want to be.”

And again, prone to bad decisions and running away when he’s angry and scared, he’d gotten on his bike and ended up wrecked and broken again. 

So when he says “We could run away,” it’s not casual. It’s not blind. He needs to go.

“Okay,” says Maddie. “Let’s run away.”

* * *

They don’t. 

He goes to meet her and gets a letter instead. 

_Go on his own_ , it says. _This is her home, she can’t leave, but he can be free_. 

Connor slipped a note alongside it when he’d handed it to Buck. _Doug guessed what she was planning when she came home without the jeep. Beat the living shit out of her. You have to get her out, Buck. Before he kills her_. 

So Buck goes to see Doug. 

He emerges a few hours after that conversation with several suitcases full of clothes, valuables, and anything that looked sentimental to Maddie. A good deal of it gets shoved out in the shed at their parents, Buck slipping back when they go on their evening walk. Two suitcases stay in the jeep.

When Maddie’s shift ends, he’s waiting on a bench facing the employee exit that she uses. Creature of habit, his sister.

“Buck?” Maddie questions, her voice one of surprise and then joy and then unrelenting fear. “Buck, what are you doing here? I thought you’d be off on an adventure already.” She laughs, too fast and too loud to be genuine, the same sort of deception she’s been forced into for years. Her hair she lets fall in front of her face while her eyes dart about, looking for someone else. Doug, of course. 

“It’s time to run away, Maddie,” says Buck. “You and me, just like you said.”

“And I said I can’t, Buck,” she returns, that tiniest bit of steel coming back out for a moment. 

“You pinky swore.”

“Buck,” she sighs, starting to turn and walk down the sidewalk.

“Your bags are already in the car.”

That stops her. “Bags? What bags? You were at my house?!” She looks hopeful and terrified all in one and it breaks Buck’s heart. They’re going to fix this. He’s going to fix this and save his sister. That’s what he wants.

Maddie’s still talking, more frantic and worried. “When Doug gets home and sees my things are gone, he’s going to come after us. Buck, I’m sorry, I know you mean well, but this just can’t work. I have a job and a marriage. I can’t…”

“Doug was there,” says Buck, cutting her off. 

Maddie freezes. “He...he was there? At the house.”

“Yes. I told him we were leaving. He won’t be coming after us.”

The disbelief on Maddie’s face is clear, as is the fear. 

“I promise, Mads. Doug will not follow us.”

There’s that flicker of hope again.

Buck holds out his pinky finger. “I said it before and I’ll say it again. We could run away. You and me. Right now.”

Tears roll down Maddie’s cheeks as she links her pinky with his. “Let’s run away,” she says.

So they do.

* * *

First, they go to Savannah, Georgia. 

He surprises Maddie with his preparation and planning. She expected him to want to drive around until their money got low enough to force them to stop and find jobs. 

“I don’t ever want going back to be on the table,” answers Buck when she says as much. “If we’re broke, we’ll make decisions out of need. So we won’t be broke.”

For Maddie, he got her hired on as a traveling nurse. Connor and the others in Maddie’s unit at the hospital had helped. They couldn’t get her away from Doug before, not if Maddie wasn’t willing to admit to the abuse, but they were happy to make sure she stayed free. It was a ten-week gig and Buck thought it seemed like a good start. 

Tourist season in full swing, lots of places hiring, he should be able to get on with a restaurant doing something. 

Ten weeks is enough to let them breathe. It’ll let Maddie see that Doug really isn’t coming after her. Let them plan the next move after that.

* * *

After that, they stay on the road for several years. 

They work out a system. Maddie picks three places looking for a traveling nurse. Buck picks the one they go to.

Sometimes they stay in the provided housing.

Sometimes they take the stipend and stay somewhere a little cheaper, setting aside the extra money. 

Buck takes a number of odd jobs and learns a number of skills and learns more about himself. 

When he turns 21, he goes out with his coworkers and gets delightfully drunk on whatever ridiculous shots he can think of, versus the usual trick of keeping his order simple so no one asks too many questions or reinvestigates his fake ID. Maddie provides him aspirin and water and tacos, then sets the cleaning stuff next to the bathroom and tells him to pay attention when he pukes.

They go out for a nice dinner the next weekend.

He’s 22 when he tells Maddie about the conversation with his professor. When he tells her that he’s known about Daniel for years. It’s not a great moment. Maddie’s apologies for her part in the secret don’t help as much as Buck thought they would. 

She clearly doesn’t like that he didn’t tell her he knew, but then gets upset with herself for acting like she has any right to that knowledge.

“What do you want?” Maddie asks when he finishes the story. “Are you getting to be who you want to be?”

“I don’t know yet,” he answers with honesty. “Maybe.”

“You’ll tell me when you do? I want to help with whatever you decide.”

“Yeah sure.”

“Buck…”

“I promise, Maddie,” he answers and pinky swears as expected.

* * *

A few months after he turns twenty-five, they’re down in Peru. Buck learned how to do a lot of things and be a lot of things and he thinks he’s starting to figure out who he wants to be. 

Maddie’s job finished up last week, but they’d decided to stay a few extra weeks, take a breather before picking the next spot. And then he met a group at the bar today and he thinks he got his answer. 

“Maddie!” he yells as he steps into their apartment. “What do you think about Los Angeles?” Oddly enough, he thinks, in all these years, they’ve never actually been to California. 

He hears his sister laugh from the other room. “What’s so funny?” he asks, after knocking at her bedroom door. 

Maddie turns her laptop towards him and shows him the multitude of tabs she has open. Every single one is about Los Angeles. “I guess we’re on the same track,” she says. “But I don’t think I want to go for just a couple of months,” she adds. “I think I’m ready to settle somewhere for a while, see if it fits. Are you...are you okay with that?”

Buck grins. “I want to be a firefighter. With the LAFD. I want to stay and I want to be somebody who saves people, just like my big sister.”

“So we’re doing this? We’re moving to LA?” she questions again.

“We could make a new home,” says Buck, reaching out with his pinky finger as he did so many years ago. “Just you and me.”

“You and me,” repeats Maddie and swears it.

* * *

“I’m Buck,” he says as he steps towards the group of firefighters in the loft. “Um, Evan Buckley, but everyone just calls me Buck.”

As he gets the introductions, he looks around and thinks ‘ _yes. This is exactly who I want to be. Someone who saves lives_ .’ Figuring out the rest of it, figuring out _what_ he wants, that’ll come with time. 

“Eddie Diaz,” says a voice that breaks him out of his reverie. The man before him is grinning, his eyes dancing with laughter. His gaze moves quickly, but clearly checks Buck out and approves.

Buck shakes his hand and grins back. 

On second thought, maybe what he wants is right in front of him.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) I really wanted to write a very specific scene of a darker Buck making sure Doug would never be able to see Maddie again, but that didn’t fit with this particular vibe. Look for it in the future though, as I’m sure I’ll write it at some point. It’ll probably have a similar vibe to my fic "A Six Minute Man" cuz I’m a bit of a sucker for a badass Buckley.
> 
> 2) I have a lot of ranting that I want to do about the Buckley parents and especially that last bullshit apology scene, but it would take forever, so just know that in my mind, that scene never ever happened. Such shitty, irresponsible writing to have the 118 let those people in after learning what they kept from Buck and then to imply Buck should be open to conversation with abusers. And that line of you were born to save people and you do? What the fuck is that? Just because they didn’t punch him in the face like Doug did to Maddie doesn’t mean they weren’t abusers and frankly, the fact that the 911 writers don’t seem to recognize this is pathetic. Anyway, end rant.


End file.
